You can’t judge a site by its Meta

We all know the old adage - “you can’t judge a book by its cover” and it’s true too… but this doesn’t stop us from doing it. Every day we rely on first impressions when making a majority of our decisions - it isn’t the ‘right’ way to make choices, but unfortunately it is how most people operate.

The online world is no different

When we do a web search, we’re presented with a list of possible options and the only thing that we have to help us choose which website is the most relevant is the site’s title and two short lines of text.

For the non-HTML or SEO savvy, the title of a webpage is (appropriately) called the ‘Title Tag’ and the two lines of text below the title is most often stored in ‘Meta Description Tags’ which are usually located at the top of your website code. If your site doesn’t have a Meta Description Tag, then the search engines try their best to sum-up what your site is about from your content. For more info on how this works, you might find Matt Cutts’ video on website snippets useful.

Before Google ever existed the search engines would often use this Meta data to help determine the relevance of a website, but now that the search engines have evolved the Meta data doesn’t have any direct impact on the optimisation of a site - but that doesn’t mean it isn’t important.

The Meta Description is your websites ‘book cover’

It’s in these two lines (150 - 160 characters) of text that you have to do what a book cover does - you have to draw people in and make them want to click on your website over-and-above all the other sites listed on the page.

This is where you have a chance to briefly explain why you are different from your competitors, add a call-to-action to encourage people to click. Mention prices, model numbers, product manufacturers, special offers - anything that you think will attract someone who is searching for you and your products.

Turn your Meta Description into a Purple Cow

To borrow a quote from Seth Godin’s book The Purple Cow:

Cows, after you’ve seen them for a while, are boring. They may be perfect cows, attractive cows, cows with great personalities, cows lit by beautiful light, but they’re still boring. A Purple Cow, though. Now that would be interesting.

This is exactly what you want to do to your Meta Description - make it stand-out from the other descriptions by being so interesting, so outrageous, and so note-worthy that anyone looking at it won’t be able to stop themselves from clicking on your site.

If Meta Descriptions won’t help with SEO, why bother?

Even though I said above that the Meta Description tag isn’t something that the search engines currently use to determine how well your website will rank - it can still help your search rankings.

From some fairly thorough testing, we’ve found that user usage data, click-through and bounce rates can affect where your site sits in the search results. It’s the search engine’s job to provide its users with the best and most relevant results, so if you have a compelling description that attracts far more clicks than the sites above you, then it gives a very clear quality signal to the search engines which in turn can result in improved rankings.

Some Useful Tools

So now that you know what a Meta Description is and how it should be used, you’re probably wondering how to go about adding or improving your tags. These tools and articles may be useful:

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